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Scintillating Synthesizers: Wendy Carlos Computer-Generates New Sounds and Scales
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11837 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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8 / 1987 |
2,572 Words |
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Lou Fournier
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I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.
- Vincent van Gogh
Her voice shares many of the characteristics of her music: soft, but with sudden accents mirroring her passion; rhythmic, and even colorful. This is Wendy Carlos, the person who, in a previous lifetime when she was Walter Carlos, wrote her way into musical history in 1968 with a landmark recording called Switched-On Bach. Today, after changes of age, gender, musical taste, and direction, she is attempting the feat again with a new milestone recording called Beauty In the Beast.
With Switched-On Bach - or "S.O.B.," as she affectionately calls it - Carlos almost single-handedly wrought the synthesizer age. Synthesizers were then playthings of the avant-garde, bulky and incredibly complex instruments that no one was really sure what to do with. Carlos took Bob Moog's instrument and put together an album of works by Bach. It remains one of the biggest-selling classical recordings of all time, and the sound of the Moog synthesizer quickly made its way into other recordings. As cheaper and easier synthesizers became available, soon no album was released without a synthesizer being heard on it.
Breaking Ground
With Beauty In the Beast, the latest in a trail of innovative recordings since "S.O.B." that have included a number of movie soundtracks (notabley A Clockwork Orange and Tron), Carlos breaks new ground that may augur the advent of another new musical age. This time, it seems, the transformation is going to take longer. "S.O.B." was a monster commercial success. While her new record company Passport/Audion won't give any sales figures, Beauty seems to be enjoying success commensurate with the bulk of new classical releases but is not setting any charts on fire. The album is actually a good deal more novel and significant than "S.O.B.," some industry figures agree, but its novelty is more esoteric. As Carlos herself suggests, the success of Beauty will depend more on her audience acquiring a taste for it. "It's like trying to teach people to like Middle Eastern food," she says.
"I'm not quite sure what the average person's reaction will be," she continues. "My fear was that it would take some time for [the record's significance] to filter down; I think it's absolutely inevitable. I'm not talking about an egotistical, personal side of it. This is something that is much bigger than me, and I know it's inevitable that this will eventually be accepted and well known and popular, and it will eventually be the way we make our music. The question is how quickly. And there's always the possibility that, as in any political development, you never really convert anyone to anything; they just get older and die and in a subsequent generation you get someone who recognizes the new thought.
"I hope that isn't going to be necessary. Certainly with the old 'S.O.B.' record, people adopted the world of synthesizers very rapidly. It's now essentially all you ever hear in pop music. That might be something that will happen with this, although it's a lot more subtle. [With the 'S.O.B.' album you heard] sounds that were very definitely different from anything you ever heard before. On this record, the sounds are only subtly different from what you've heard
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